The Smart Money Watches You Watch Videos

"The goal is to be able to do an economic comparison to TV spending," he said. Unlike TV viewers, however, Internet users can rewind to certain parts of a video or forward clips to friends; both are signs that the audience is more engaged than it is with TV broadcasts, he said.

Other firms distribute video clips to a variety of Web sites, then show producers how well they fared with certain audiences. TubeMogul, based in Emeryville, Calif., distributes videos across the Web to sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Metacafe and Yahoo Video. "The All-For-Nots," for example, a Web series about a traveling band produced by Michael Eisner's start-up Vuguru, is distributed to sites by TubeMogul. The company then tallies how well each episode or season did based on how often it was viewed.

There is a downside: Having so many systems for measuring the success of Web video makes it harder to arrive at an industry consensus.

The lack of a universal standard for measurement is confusing for marketers, said Bobby Tulsiani, an analyst with Jupiter Research. Companies will have a harder time judging the efficacy of their ads if they must compare several types of measurements, he said.

Online tools offer greater depth of information about their viewers than current TV metrics, he said, but it may take a while before the industry agrees on a standard of measurement.

But some say they've already gained confidence in the value of video.

At the Catamount Ski Resort on the border of New York and Massachusetts, Vice President of Marketing Rich Edwards started posting homemade videos about the mountain on the resort's Web site. After putting new content on the site, Edwards said he notices an increase in online lift ticket sales, group lesson sales and lodging reservations.

Dragonfly, the company that hosts Catamount's videos, gauges the duration of viewing in terms of "vunits," or minutes of viewed video measured in 10-second intervals. Edwards said the videos have received 275,000 "vunits" since December.

He attributes the overall increase in business to the popularity of the site's video content and plans next season to use the data to solicit advertising for the site.

The data "tells me people are staying on the Web site," he said. "They might not be looking at the video for the whole three minutes, but while the video is running they're looking at our specials, our lesson packages."

Amateur videographers are also using the measurement tools to quantify the popularity of their videos, which in turn can boost their chances of finding sponsors.

Jodie Rivera, 24, posts spoofs and comedy sketches on her own YouTube channel, called Venetian Princess. Through YouTube's reporting tool, she discovered that viewership of her videos typically peaks on Wednesday evenings. She now uploads her videos on Tuesdays in hopes they will qualify for the "top-viewed" list the following day.

She also discovered she has a following in Britain, so she is planning new sketches based on British pop culture, and she may modify her upload schedule to fit the time difference. Being able to target her videos to fans has helped her attract ads, she said.

"It gave me a better idea of who my audience is," she said.